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American literature

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The Naked and the Dead (1948), Mailer wrote in the Dos Passos tradition of social protest. Feeling its limitations, he developed his own brand of surreal fantasy in fables such as
An American Dream (1965) and
Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). As with many of the postmodern novelists, his subject was the nature of power, personal as well as political. However,...

discussed in biography

...won the admiration of a younger generation seeking alternative styles of life and art. Mailer’s subsequent novels, though not critical successes, were widely read as guides to life.
An American Dream (1965) is about a man who murders his wife, and
Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) is about a young man on an Alaskan hunting trip.